


Bouquets

by TheWasAndShouldBeKing



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 05:39:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12006204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWasAndShouldBeKing/pseuds/TheWasAndShouldBeKing
Summary: When they'd first arrived, here in the Nightmare, it had been a wash of confusion and paralyzing fear, whether they were being hunted through the myriad hellscapes by some bloodthirsty monster, or simply huddled about the little campfire clearing. No one had dared wander beyond the circle of light for the longest time. Even after they'd begun to experience the visions of the Blood Web, it had taken a bit of time for any of them to realize: they had to gather the things for which they'd bargained...





	Bouquets

 

 

Claudette wakes from her doze against Meg's shoulder feeling just as unrested as ever, rubbing clumsily at the purple crescents beneath her glasses. She hasn't been able to get any real sleep for far too long as it is, but it's even more draining when "sleep" actually means a laboriously considered 'game' of take-before-it's-taken in the vision they call "The Blood Web." 

She's had a fairly good string of successful Trials recently, not just getting out alive, but getting shit done, too. Generators fixed. Companions rescued. That's always bolstering, energizing, in and of itself, but in this world everything functions just-so. The puppet master of it all had long ago devised a way to sap that strength, and turn even the defeat of Its monsters to Its dark purpose.

So now Claudette is feeling grim and restless, once again, all that flush success expended for the opportunity to gain advantages. Nothing guaranteed, mind you. She and her fellow survivors are the ones who have to make good use of the things they barter for. But abstaining from the dodgy ritual is just as ill advised. It's nothing that can be tangibly proven, but they've all agreed: if they don't make use of the Blood Web in a timely fashion, their tormentors seem to reap the benefit.

"Whatcha got?" Meg asks idly, stretching like a cat, now that Claudette's slumped figure is no longer weighing her down.

Claudette shrugs, her lack of enthusiasm clearly telegraphing that most of it will be common. Of debatable use. She really only wrestled one treasure from her nocturnal meditations, and it's right in her wheelhouse.

"Gonna go pick some flowers," she answers aloud, after a moment, wiping down the lenses of her glasses on the corner of her shirt. "Wanna come?"

Meg does her the courtesy of at least pretending to consider, but Claudette doesn't really expect anything other than the head shake she gets in response. Trailing after isn't really the runner's style. 

She glances over to the boys to see if either of them look any more likely to come along, but Dwight is tying knots into the corners of a kerchief with ritualized concentration, and Jake has zoned out, staring into the embers of their ever-burning bonfire. She suspects he's tracing the paths of the Blood Web himself. 

Perhaps they'll go scavenging for the rest of what they've come up with after, but Claudette is confident she can handle the botanicals herself.

She dusts the seat of her jeans as she stands, giving Meg a little wave as she walks off toward the treeline. The mists swirl around her ankles in little tendrils and eddies, but none of it is thick enough to be alarming. She's confident she has time to claim her prize before they're spirited off again.

When they'd first arrived, here in the Nightmare, it had been a wash of confusion and paralyzing fear, whether they were being hunted through the myriad hellscapes by some bloodthirsty monster, or simply huddled about the little campfire clearing. No one had dared wander beyond the circle of light for the longest time. Even after they'd begun to experience the visions of the Blood Web, it had taken a bit of time for any of them to realize: they had to gather the things for which they'd bargained.

Jake figured it out first, when the firelight had glinted off the lens of a flashlight, lying off in the scrub. Already a survivalist, well familiar with living off the land, he had gradually emboldened them to stretch out, and gather up the resources that It scattered about their small scrap of Its world. Claudette had discovered the Offerings, well, some of them anyway, teaching her fellow survivors how to recognize the various plants that sprung up between the saplings along the wood.

No one ever actually harasses them, here, and they'd gradually explored further from home base, coming up with more trinkets to bolster their tools, or to burn. The feeling of eyes upon them never fully dissipates, though, and the general rule is to never lose sight of the fire, flickering through the trees.

Claudette is starting to think she's being tricked into breaking that rule, to find what she's looking for, when she finally sets eyes on the rose bush nestled between the boles of the trees. The damn thing is never in the same place, twice. Just like the Realms they're pulled into for their bloody, godawful Trials, this place also shifts, rearranging itself at the whim and will of the mysterious, and malevolent Entity that rules over all. 

Claudette curses It under her breath, as she retrieves her pruning sheers from her pocket, crouching to examine the bush. It's an odd one, this plant. It doesn't really resemble any breed of rose she's seen, outside, back home. The dark blooms shimmer with an oilslick iridescence. The pale blossoms glow like moonstone.

"Huh."

And isn't that even more unusual? She's never seen the two kinds intertwined. She's seen the pale roses, in varying stages of bloom, meant for their bouquets of brightness, and more rare, the dark flowers that blot the moon, but never both together.

Perhaps Jake had a bouquet in his Web as well. If she'd waited, they could have made this trek together after all. 

It's a shame, really, Claudette reflects. She's never been stellar at socializing and making friends. Before all this, she'd absolutely preferred the quiet, passive company of plant life, and the simple, considered communication of internet forums. The nuanced demands of conversing face-to-face confused and distressed her. Being thrown in with this little ragtag lot, however... 

Jake is especially easy going. He might not know all the Latin names for things, or how the biology of it all really works, but he's got a better working knowledge of nature than most folks do. Living off the land as he did, before, demanded it. And even better than that, she never feels the pressure to force a conversation with Jake. They can just hang out in a semi-comfortable sort of silence, which Claudette imagines could be completely comfortable, if there wasn't the ever present anxiety of survival. The literal need to have each other's back.

But she can still see the distant, candle-flame flicker between the trees, if she just turns her head, so Claudette chalks it up to a minor missed opportunity, and focuses on the roses instead.

In the darkness, it's difficult to see the thorny stems. She has to focus to keep from bloodying her fingers on the cruel barbs that the Entity has adorned Its flora with. It makes the harvest slow going, and she only has three of the dark roses set aside before she hears the noise of footsteps through the trees.

Jake must have tracked her through the woods, following her footprints and the broken underbrush to reach the thicket, quicker than she had. Or that's what she thinks, for just a split second.

It's all too quickly obvious that the stride doesn't belong to Jake. Or to Dwight. Or Meg. It's far too heavy, and uneven. A limping, shambling step unique to only one other creature in the whole of the Nightmare. Claudette is on her feet and shuffling back in an instant, keeping her head below the brambles.

It's tempting to break into an all-out run and just book it back to the campfire. She's been crouched for too long though, able to feel the stiffness in her calves, expecting the stab of pins-and-needles numbness if she rights herself so fast. And she has no idea if the monster coming her way is armed. She has no idea what might happen to her, if she's cut down here, outside the confines of what they call the Trials.

Everything here works _just-so_. But this is a variable she's unprepared for.

Claudette manages to scuttle around the base of a particularly broad tree trunk before the monster lumbers into view. He looks to be searching, hunting, his misshapen head swiveling on deformed shoulders, obscuring the thick stump of his neck. The glow of his eyes pierces through swaths of oddly stretched flesh, running back and forth like lamps across the clearing.

Has she been spotted already? Claudette clasps a hand over her mouth, trying to breathe as silently as possible, praying whatever soft sounds she makes are obscured by the hulking figure's heavy, laboured breaths.

She waits, cold sweat prickling on her skin. Waits for the charge, watching for hideous red glow of the Stain, the foul light that precedes their tormentors, ears pricked for the wicked heartbeat that heralds them.

It is with deep consternation that Claudette slowly realizes it is only her own blood pounding in her ears. That there is no otherworldly light splashed across the underbrush, anywhere...

The lumbering footsteps stop, abruptly. She hears a noise, inarticulate, but triumphant, from the other side of the bush, followed by a leafy tearing. Plants being ripped apart. An icy dread seizes Claudette as she realizes that the beast is destroying the rose bush, destroying the rare and hard won treasure that she'd bartered from the Entity at the hefty cost of wit and daring and survival.

Before she realizes the lunacy of what she's done, she's scrambled out from behind the cover of her tree trunk, voice shrill as she cries out her dismay, "Don't! No!!"

The monster freezes. Claudette freezes, those pins and needles crawling up her legs, just as expected, taunting her stupidity with a painful reminder that she's thoroughly fucked if she tries to run.

The only small blessing she can scrounge up is the absence of the chainsaw, and, she notes, with likely futile relief, the cattle hammer. The disfigured creature looming over her is entirely unarmed, nothing but fist fulls of roses clutched in his deadly hands.

His head tilts slightly, luminous eyes blinking slowly as he looks down on her, cowering now in front of him. She expects he'll throw down the flowers and lunge at any moment, surprised expression devolving into murderous glare, but the moments stretch on and that reality fails to manifest.

In the end, he seems to dismiss her very presence, reaching into the rosebush again to clumsily rip out another stalk of the plant.

"Hey!" Claudette's distress shifts track again, watching a dark bloom pulled out amidst a small sprig of opalescent white. The brute plucks it roughly from the bunch, tossing it down like so much garbage, rather than the precious commodity it truly is. 

Fear keeps her from darting forward to snatch it up, at least enough good sense remaining than to deliberately step inside the killer's reach. He may be unarmed, but a beast like this could easily choke the life from someone like Claudette, with bare hands.

She's ignored again. With single-minded purpose, he plunges his meaty paw through the foliage, grasping for more rose stems. This time, though, with a yelp of surprise and betrayal, he yanks it back out, empty handed. Claudette can only stare as the creature sucks his palm, glaring at the bush now, like it's some shifty, untrustworthy thing. Like it's crouched there, waiting to bite him.

In the state of wreckage that it's in, Claudette can see that's not too far-fetched an impression. The thorns on the thinner part of the stems are nasty enough, at least to someone like herself. Inside the bush they are even larger, packed close together, and barbed, wickedly. Tough enough to pierce even thickly calloused hide.

He's still staring at it, contemplating, and the realization dawns on Claudette that these monsters, who seem so mindless in their bloodthirsty pursuit of the survivors in the Trials, might just have a little more to them. He's making a bouquet, too, that's obvious now. An Offering, to be burned for an advantage in a match, just the same as she is.

His bouquet will flood the arena with full moon light, making it easier for him to spot Claudette and her companions as they try to creep around and evade his grasp. Hers will suffuse everything in shadow, making them trickier to find, especially some one as dark-complected as Claudette.

If she can get her roses, that is, before they're torn apart and trampled under foot.

An absolutely insane idea comes into her head.

"Uhhh... hey," she speaks tentatively, struggling to find her voice again, mouth dry as the desert. "Hey, uh, Mister?"

She has a sense of actual vertigo for a moment, addressing the brute standing off a short distance, but still unnervingly near. She's trying to talk to this thing, this beast, who has pursued her, beaten her down with a hammer meant to crush cows' skulls, sliced her open with a goddamn chainsaw, and sacrificed her to its dark god on rusted meat hooks. And not just once. Over and over. They've played out this macabre charade of torture and murder, only for Claudette to find herself resurrected, to be thrown in with this merciless killer again and again. 

And she just called him "Mister."

It does get his attention. She's treated to another tilt of his head, another curious blink. His hand is still up at his mouth, and the gesture, combined with his present demeanor, looks so goddamn childish that Claudette nearly laughs at the absurdity. She barely chokes back the hysterical impulse, making only the tiniest of incredulous, terrified squeaks.

"You're... you're picking flowers...?" She asks tentatively, and he seems to weigh something for a minute before he answers her, just a slow nod of his head.

He understands language then, which is a giddy revelation of its own, but Claudette shoves it aside. She wants to get this over with quickly, before everything goes south.

"Me too," she points to the blossoms she'd already set aside, and he follows her gesture with his beady eyes, regarding the cut flowers with an unreadable expression. She holds her breath, waiting for it to upset him, expecting he knows the reason she's gathering these as clearly as she's deduced his purpose. He merely gives her another measured nod, before pulling his thumb out of his mouth and showing off the gouge in it.

It's not new information to Claudette that he can be hurt. They've managed to stun their attackers before, though not much. Just scrapes and bruises that the killers shrug off as minor inconveniences. They've never gotten hands on anything that could be called a weapon, especially not something that would be effective against hulking brutes like this. But it still strikes Claudette as oddly trusting. Uncalculating at least. 

"Yeah, those thorns are no joke, huh?" Claudette chuckles awkwardly, taking in a breath before she makes her play. "I, uh... I have some pruning shears with me..."

She takes the tool out, carefully, watching the expression on that malformed face, reading its expression like a foreign language, and she's already socially dyslexic. For a moment it's blank, perhaps distrusting. Then he shambles closer, to get a better look at the small scissors.

Claudette can't help herself; she cringes back and the brute stops, abruptly. The air is suddenly brittle. The lamps of his eyes are narrowed and searching her face. She's staring back, dinner plates behind the lenses of her glasses, and she holds her breath for a minute as her mind races. Waiting for the lunge.

There's no heartbeat, no red light, but she thinks he might be angry. She struggles with body language at the best of times, but there's a tension in his broad shoulders, his bulk leaning forward just a little. Threatening.

No... _challenging._ Challenging! 

The revelation strikes her desperately. He's waiting for her to make a move. It's possible that he's doing exactly the same thing that she's doing: waiting for some cue that says despite these abnormal, unexpected circumstances, they still have to play their parts. Him, the monster, and her, the prey.

If she runs, he'll chase. If.

"S-sorry..." she breathes out slowly. "Reflexes."

She tries a nervous smile, and takes a cautious step closer, holding out the shears again. 

"I use these to cut the roses, so I can avoid the thorns." It's a bit delayed, but he visibly relaxes as she explains, what she thinks is curiosity coming into his face again. She demonstrates how they open and close, and there's a definite light of understanding. He fishes around in one of his pockets, and produces a pair of pliers, after, demonstrating the same action.

"Yeah!" Claudette wonders if this how Fossey felt, the first time she realized she could communicate with a creature entirely capable of tearing her, limb from limb. "Yeah, but mine are sharp. I could cut the roses for both of us...?"

He nods again, and with tentative steps, Claudette moves back toward the rosebush, to begin her task anew.

She keeps half an eye on her unlikely companion, who has plunked himself down to sort through the flowers he'd already torn out, picking the ones he likes best for his bouquet. He even retrieves the dark bloom he'd thrown out, laying it alongside Claudette's small harvest, thoughtfully. It's not long before they each have a half dozen full, perfect roses on long, neatly pruned stems. She ties each bundle with a thin bit of vine, before gathering them up, holding the bunch of pale flowers out tentatively.

It's a very near miss, when he reaches out to take the bouquet. She can feel the warmth radiating off his grimy skin, millimeters down the stems from her own hand, and she shivers, despite that heat. It seems a conscious thing he does, avoiding a clumsy brush of hands, and she wonders if it's some how just as uncomfortable for him to have been caught up in this unusual happenstance of enemies in no-man's-land.

"Thank y', Ma'am."

Claudette is dumbstruck by the slow, thick words. She'd grappled with the realization that she was understood, but she's _floored_ when she hears the hulking man speak. It's a bit fumbled, owing to the skew of his mouth, but the Southern drawl is distinct, still plenty clear. 

All mental comparison with great apes in jungle forests flies right out of her head. This is a proper person, with proper intelligence, here in front of her. Who murders Claudette and her companions, regularly.

It's chilling, makes her stomach do small flips. If she vomits, suddenly, how will he react?

"Ah best be gittin' back," his gravely voice sounds almost chided, like a kid who knows he's pushing his curfew. She thinks a sheepish smile tugs at his lips, but again, the disfigurement makes it difficult to tell.

Claudette's the one who nods silently, now, head tilting back as she watches him lumber up to his feet. She worries for one insane moment that he'll have some sort of good, Southern manners, and offer her a hand up, but he does no such thing. He does, however, tip his leather hat, just a bit, "See y'all when we play ag'in."

Then he ambles off into the woods, back the way he came and away from the survivors' camp. The last she hears of him is a distant mutter, wondering to himself, "ifn' a pair of wire cutters might do the same trick."

Handy with the tools then. She supposes he has to maintain that hideous chainsaw of his, somehow.

She doesn't really remember the walk back to the campfire. Just a dreamlike impression of passing trees. Then she's settling herself back down next to Meg, stiff-limbed, with the bouquet pressed to her chest.

"Hey, you okay?" Dwight's eyebrows are knit with concern, and Jake snaps out of his reverie. Meg reaches out, rubbing a hand across her shoulders, and Claudette guesses she must look like she's seen a ghost. "What happened?"

What to tell them...?

She's starting to think this was no accident. No little, lazy oversight by the Entity, who always makes everything just-so. 

It had been horrible enough, being hunted down by these monsters, ever silent, unfailingly cruel, and presumably impossible to reason with. They had been like deer before wolves. Zebra and lions. 

But now it's as though It is saying, _"I don't care if you talk to them. They know that you're people. They're people, too. And they're still going to **slaughter** you." _

Claudette dissolves into tears, sobbing aloud and hiccoughing breaths. The sudden outburst alarms her companions even further, the unknown cause almost as distressing to them as it is to her. But knowing this... knowing this is so, so much worse! How can she tell them...? It might kill her, holding this in, but...

How can she tell them? 

 

 

 


End file.
